Polymorphism- Genetic Clinical Trial
Official title:
Imaging and Genetic Investigation of Learning and Decision Making
Background: - Previous research has shown that dopamine, a brain chemical, is involved in decision making. Different genes influence how much dopamine people have in their brains and how that affects their behavior. Researchers will study if genes associated with dopamine affect decision making and impulsiveness. All participants will take tests; some will have brain images taken. Researchers will study the test responses and images; they will look for how differences in these genes affect different types of decision making. Objectives: - To see if genes involved in a brain chemical, dopamine, are related to impulsiveness on behavioral tests. Eligibility: - Healthy adults ages 18 to 55. Design: - Participants will be screened with a medical history and physical exam. - All participants in this study will have at least 1 outpatient visit to the NIH Clinical Center. Each visit will last 2 4 hours. At the first visit: - A blood sample will be taken only from participants that have not been previously enrolled in 95-M-0150 - Participants will be given tests of their memory, attention, concentration, and thinking. - Some participants will have a second visit. It will be scheduled as soon as possible after the first. At the second visit: - Participants will have an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). They will have to lie in a scanner for up to 2 hours. The MRI uses magnets, radio waves, and computers to produce detailed pictures of the brain. - Participants will repeat the tests from the first visit. Some will be done during the MRI.
The objective of this study is to examine the effects of genetic variability in the dopamine signaling pathway on metric measures of impulsivity. Our hypothesis is that increased dopamine levels or conversion of dopamine to intracellular signals, brought about by specific variants of genes in this pathway, will increase impulsivity in our behavioral tasks. We will examine variability by recruiting up to 400 ethnically and racially diverse healthy adult male and female volunteers aged 18 to 55. We will carry out genotyping, behavioral testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging on this group. We will initially recruit a large pool of subjects for behavioral testing and genotyping. Behavioral tests will include various laboratory tasks related to impulsivity. We have recently developed a series of tasks that we have used in a group of Parkinson s patients with impulsive/compulsive behaviors (PD+ICBs). Several tasks have shown large group effects between Parkinson s patients with and without ICBs (PD +/- ICBs). We will focus on those tasks in the present study. Specific examples include information sampling tasks and measures of novelty preference. If genetic effects on behavior in the large sample are found, we will ask a subset of the original sample to return for fMRI testing. The subset will be selected to allow us to examine the neural circuits that operate differently as a function of genotype. In other words, they will be selected on the basis of their genotype. The outcome measure in this case will be differences in brain activity as a function of genotype, during performance of our behavioral task. ;